The Barclays of New York
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. d National Library of Scotland *B0001 78779* -7^ U ^^ a.(St*s?/ ^zcS-czsCS- ¥> J-~lX, & c*CsS Azcs~o&tl '?*•?• jr J*-<^ ft % V. * V The Barclays of New York : Who They Are and Who They Are Not, — and Some Other Barclays BY R. BURNHAM MOFFAT NEW YORK ROBERT GRIER COOKE, PUBLISHER 1904 Copyright, 1904 By R. BURNHAM MOFFAT PRESS OF THE LIVINGSTON MlDOLEDITCH CO. NEW YORK ALEXANDER BARCLAY, Eso^ OF St. Paul, Minnesota — CONTENTS. PAGE PART I. —A Mistaken Tradition. Testimony of the Records of East New Jersey i PART II. —A Mistaken Tradition, Continued. Testimony of the Records at Bury Hill, Surrey 17 PART III. —A Mistaken Tradition, Continued. Testimony of the Records in London. ... 41 PART IV. Line of Descent from John Barclay, of East New Jersey 53 PART V. The Dublin Branch of the Barclays of Ury 66 PART VI. Line of Descent from Thomas Bar- clay, of St. Mary's County, Maryland. 86 PART VII. Line of Descent from Rev. Thomas Barclay, First Rector of St. Peter's Church, Albany 99 PART VIII. Extracts from New York City Direc- tories. 1786-1803 219 PART IX. —A Partial Table of Descent of the Barclays of Ury 222 PART X. Sundry Lines of Descent of American Barclays and Barkleys 227 PART XL Some Scattered Barclay Records..!. 332 PART XII. Sundry Records of the Barclays in Ireland, other than of the Ury Family. 374 — Contents. PAGE APPENDIX A.—Records of the Amboy Monthly Meeting 382 APPENDIX B.—Act of Parliament, 45 Geo. Ill, Chap. 88 385 APPENDIX C. Ancestry of Eady Katharine Gor- don 394 APPENDIX D. Arms of the Barclays of Pierston and of the Barclays of Mather and Urie 396 APPENDIX E.—East Will of John Barclay, Second of that Name in East New Jersey .... 399 APPENDIX F. Memorandum Touching Records in Virginia and Maryland 402 INDEX I. —Surname Barclay 417 INDEX II. —Surname Barkley 427 INDEX III. —Surnames other than Barclay 431 THE following pages have grown out of the author's search for the ancestry of his great grandfather, Thomas Bar- clay, of St. Mary's County, Maryland. The interesting matter that came to his notice during the course of that search invited frequent digressions from his own line, until his notes were charged with a variety of material which he felt should be preserved in some permanent form. He accordingly determined to print privately and at his own expense what appears in the following pages; but so many requests have come to him for copies of the book that he has recently decided to place it upon the market at somewhat less than cost, and thus make it readily accessible to all who care for it. He is conscious that in a work of this kind, to which he has been able to give only his leisure hours, errors are bound to creep in,—particularly in tables of descent where it is sought to make a record of precise dates of birth, death and marriage ; and he earnestly invites the correction of errors and the supplying of omitted names and dates. He wishes, too, to express his thanks to the many who have aided him with the material used, and in particular to express his appreciation of the courtesy shown him by Mr. Robert H. Kexby, the librarian of the New York Historical Society, by Mr. Beale, the Register of the Friends Records in Eustace Street, Dublin, and by the Officials of the Record Office in Dublin. New York, January 2, 1904. R. B. M. PART I. A Mistaken Tradition.—Testimony of the Records of East New Jersey. TRADITION has been seriously entertained by many of A the descendants of Rev. Thomas Barclay, the first rector of St. Peter's at Albany, that they are of Ury stock. Their ancestor, the Rev. Thomas, they assert, was the son of John Barclay of Ury who settled in East New Jersey m 1684, married (according to the tradition) one "Cornelia Van Schaick," and died there in 1731,—the issue of such union being the same Thomas Barclay who in 1708 appeared as a catechist among the Indians on the upper Hudson, and subsequently became more widely known as the first rector of St. Peter's at Albany. The public and private records, the old letters and the docu- ments which have come to the notice of the writer in tracing his own line of descent, have borne such convincing testimony to the inaccuracy of the tradition that he has felt impelled to lay before those who may be interested the facts which in his judgment wholly disprove the claim that Rev. Thomas Barclay of St. Peter's was of the Ury family. John Barclay, who settled in East New Jersey in 1684, was the second son of Col. David Barclay of Ury. The father had served with distinction in the Thirty Years War as a follower of Gustavus Adolphus, and had borne arms in the civil wars at home. On December 24th, 1647, he married Lady Katharine Gordon, known as the ''White Rose of Scotland," and about a year later (in 1648) purchased from William, Earl of Mareschal, the estate of Ury in the County of Kincardine, Scotland. In 1679, under charter from the crown, this estate and some neigh- boring estates which were also owned by Col. David, were united into the "Barony of Ury." Until some time preceding the pur- chase of Ury and for a period of more than five hundred years, the family had owned and been identified with the estate of Mathers ; but through financial stress Col. David Barclay's father had been forced to part with this ancient holding, and the family : ; A Mistaken Tradition. later became more widely known as the "Barclays of Ury," al- though sometimes designated as "of Mathers and Ury." In 1666 Col. David joined the Society of Friends and as a consequence was subjected to persecution, imprisonment and frequent indignities. He is described "as proper tall a person- " age of a man as could be seen among thousands. His hair " white as the flax, but quite bald upon the top of his head, which " obliged him to wear commonly a black satin cap under his hat." He died in 1686 and was buried near Ury on the 12th of Oc- tober of that year. 1 Three sons and two daughters were born to Col. David Barclay, and Lady Katharine Gordon, his wife ;" Robert, born 1648, the "Apologist Lucy, died 1686, unmarried; Jean, married Sir Ewen Cameron, of Lochiel John, born 1659, who migrated to East New Jersey; and David, his youngest son, who died at sea, unmarried. The migration of John Barclay to America was doubtless due, in part at any rate, to the life appointment of his older brother, Robert, as governor of the then proprietary province of East New Jersey. Robert did not come out to America, nor did John come out as his deputy ; but, in the earlier days of his resi- dence in the province, John Barclay was prominent in its affairs and seems, so long as he remained an orthodox Quaker, to have stood in close relations with his family in Scotland. With the change of faith, however, which we read of within the few years following his settlement at Perth Amboy, an estrangement from his family followed (for religious tolerance was but little known in those days, and as little among the Quakers as among others), and John Barclay seems soon to have lost that influence and prestige which his birth and family connections would naturally have secured for him and for his descendants. The part he played in the affairs of the province may per- haps be the better appreciated if the relation of the province to the mother country be made plain at the outset. It was on August 27, 1664, that the English captured New Amsterdam from the Dutch ; but even prior to such capture, and 'Genealogical Account oe the Barclays of Urie, London; John Herbert, 1812. Records of East New Jersey. in confident anticipation thereof, King Charles II had granted the entire province to his brother James, Duke of York, and he in turn had divided the territory so granted and had conveyed to Lord John Berkeley and to Sir George Carteret all that portion of the province which was bounded on the east by the Hudson River, on the west by the Delaware River, and on the north by a line drawn from river to river at about the 41st parallel of lati- tude. Both Lord John Berkeley (who was a brother of Sir William Berkeley, more widely known as the Governor of Vir- ginia from 1660 to 1677), and Sir George Carteret had been dis- tinguished and steadfast loyalists during the civil wars ; and out of compliment to Carteret, who as Governor of the little island of Jersey in the British Channel had been the last commander during such wars to lower the royal flag, the tract so granted was named New Jersey. In the year following the capture of New Amsterdam, Philip Carteret, a kinsman of Sir George, was granted a governor's commission and sailed for the province accompanied by a number of colonists. He landed at the spot soon afterwards called Eliza- bethtown, in honor of Lady Carteret, and there he established the seat of government. The Dutch recaptured the province in 1673 ; but upon the conclusion of peace on February 9th, 1674, the English title to the soil was finally recognized and New Jersey reverted to its English proprietors.